Hey Ho, Tenebrous Cult!

It's that wonderful time again.

In our first three years of publishing a Best New Weird Horror anthology, Alex and I were pretty devil-may-care, free-wheeling, anything-goes, shoot-all-your-shots with the submissions process:

Authors, send us your five—fuck it, seven or eight—top stories! Nominate your friends! Your enemies! Here, scribble your story on this blank spot on my t-shirt, I'll read it off paired mirrors when I get home! No, putting your own name on your manuscript isn't necessary, helpful sure, but not necessary!

And that worked—well, it worked lunatically. But I mean, we're both a little insane and a lot devoted to remaining as accessible as possible. This year we put a few common-sense guardrails on subbing—while still encouraging everyone and anyone to make recommendations for anything that fits the guidelines—and you still provided. In the order of many hundreds.

From that heap of glorious, wonderful, wild Weird, we are honored to present to you...

...The 2025 BRAVE NEW WEIRD Shortlist

(in alphabetical order)

A. L. Munson We Told You of the One Who Lives in the Mound

A.L. Goldfuss Drosera regina

Addison Smith Those Perfect Materials

Akis Linardos Up His Arm Crawls a Tooth-sized Spider

Alex Tucker Blue Hole

Alexander James Silver Wires & Sweet Water

Alistair Rey Leviathan’s Womb

Amabilis O'Hara A Sign Hangs From My Hunger

Andrew Humphrey Dark Water

Andrew Kozma The Only Good Billionaire

Andrew Rivas THE GOOPY LIL GUYS GO VIRAL

Angela Sylvaine #blessed

Ash Huang Safe Face

Ashley Stokes Orange Slab

Audrey Zhou Two’s Company, Three Might Be A Sign of Demonic

Possession

Ben Tufnell Bosch

Benjamin Larned That Red Hot Beat

Beth Goder Mirror-hole

Biscuit Starberry You Are Going to Die

Caleb Bethea Glitter in Your Eyes

Caroline Hung Ticket po mamser.

Cassiopeia Gatmaitan Maiden, Monster, Muse

Chase Anderson Space is Full of Ghosts (and I fucking hate it here)

Chris Scott The Sunflower Farmer

Chris Sumberg There's Lobster in Heaven!

Chris W. McGuinness Tract 16

Colin Hinckley The Roots Run Deep, It Blooms Like a Flower

Corrie Haldane Hivemind

D. Marmara In the Amygdala of the Beholder

Dane Erbach That Night

Daniel Loring Keating Letter of Apology from Eldritch Appliances, LLC

David Corse All My Angry Selves 

David Luntz Brief Interlude with the Night Hag

Diana Dima Logoptera

Drew Broussard Almost Everything He Dreamed

Jennifer Hudak The Colonists

Juleigh Howard-Hobson Death Doesn't Sound Like It Looks

Kawai Shen The Doll's Boy

Kelsea Yu Deliquescence

Lisa Cai Margery Lung Is Unstoppable

Lyndsie Manusos Proscenium

Mary Kuryla Wig

Maura Yzmore She Giggled, Slippery In My Arms

Morgan Chalfant D'rix

Morgan Melhuish A Fragment of the Heart of Sappho

Nemo Arator Midnight Surgery

Patrick Malka What We Remember, What We Pass Down

Rain Corbyn Haute

Steven Patchett Bob's Machine 

T.L. Bodine Cowbirds

TJ Price Exhibits...

Tom W. Raymond PIAMF

Toshiya Kamei Sworn Brothers 

Trevor James Zaple What Comes On The West Wind

V. H. Chen Eleven Songs For Another Lover

Wailana Kalama The Lazarus Ruins

Wen Wen Yang Drought's Vengeance

William Shaw The Universe’s Best Erotic Writing, Volume 1: A Book

Review by Ian Harrison

Wyatt Robinette Nothing Extreme, Please

Z.D. Dochterman Avila Beach

Zebulon Horse The Mascot's Head

Everyone on this list is now a BNW-nominated author with a BNW-nominated story. All nominees will receive a shout-out in the anthology, and the winners will be notified for further details within a few weeks, with a tentative anthology release scheduled for late June.

Congratulations to all the fabulous creators on this list, and thank you to everyone who submitted. We still have our work cut out for us, compiling the leanest, meanest, Weirdest 70,000-ish words that we can from the above.

Editor's note:

If a name isn't on the list and you feel any sort of way about it, be it yours or someone else's, you're probably righter than we are!

As much as we (collective, editors doing best-of anthologies) try to market them as the 'best' works, that's a loose marketing term and largely only exists because 'the ones we happened to vibe with most and thought were a nice broad showcase, because really there's no such thing as objectively best or even objectively better stories of the year anthology' would have been a cumbersome title.

Any piece not being present is not an indication that it isn't good enough, or Weird enough. If there were such a thing as best and Weirdest, we would all be publishing the same twenty stories, and much as there are people out there who believe that's an acceptable practice, that's not us.

One of our favourite people in publishing is Michael Kelly of Undertow Publications, who curates Best Weird Fiction of the Year, and watching the broad range and variety in his choices, as well as how different they are from ours, is always a joy. That should be more than ample proof that Weird is, largely, in the eye of the Weirdo, and 'best' is how we get authors in front of readers, not an exclusion of everyone else.

TL;DR: We're sorry we can't scream about all of what we receive, and then some. There is so much magnificent work out there, and there should be more people screaming about it.

CASUAL BY KOJI A. DAE IS A 2026 PHILIP K. DICK AWARD NOMINEE!

Literally as we're typing this missive up, we received the above news! All our congratulations to Koji for this incredibly deserved recognition:

In a catalogue full of left turns, we're exceedingly proud of how CASUAL stands distinct, and it's emboldened us to feel free in pursuing more and more avenues in pursuit of the New and the Weird. It's an uncomfortably prescient book; it's thoughtful and complex and highly original Weird science fiction. Koji's voice is one well worth listening to.

About CASUAL:

Valya’s neural implant is amazing.

CASUAL managed her depression and anxiety, stabilized her mood, and helped her get pregnant, but new laws forbid her from using the device when she's sole caregiver for her infant, so Valya needs to detox before giving birth. The full-blown panic attacks have her considering a controversial clinical trial that would place a tandem implant in her unborn baby and allow Valya to keep hers active. Her only options are to attempt solo parenting without CASUAL, or install a minimally tested device in her vulnerable child.

Casual is a stark and cutting glance at a near future that looks uncannily like our present, exploring themes of bodily autonomy and the struggle for mental health in a world increasingly divided.

“Up there with Atwood, Bradbury, Dick, and Gibson. Dae’s novel seems both inevitable and horrifying. A must-read for the moment.” 

• Literary Hub, The Most Anticipated Books of 2025

"A stunningly written story about class, mental health, women’s autonomy and all the ways a society can seek to control these, in a future so real I could almost touch it.”

•  Ed Crocker, FanFiAddict 

“Eerily believable, incredibly relatable and heartbreaking.”

• Booklist

If you haven't checked out CASUAL yet, well: ain't no time like the present! (Because the future is starting to feel a lot like this book reads💀)

Get CASUAL

LOVE IN THE TIME OF COMMERCE

While we've got you, how about some fancy [citation needed] but devastating books?

We've got a couple preorders open right now, for Kristal Stittle's Weird alien invasion/Canadian wilderness survival manual KAYAK, and Vincent Endwell's Twin Peaks by way of Appalachian Dollywood, OLYOKE.

You can get each of those individually at our webstore; or you could consider

taking the plunge on a 2026 lineup that touches on just about every New Weird corner of the Horror-SciFi-Fantasy universe and sub to the Tenebrous Book Club.

We've got print+eBook and eBook-only options, and Book Club subscribers get some fun bonus features not available anywhere else.

Shop the Tenebrous Webstore

We'll see you soon. Keep fighting. You matter.

Hail Indie Publishing.

Hail New Weird Horror (+ More!)

Hail the Tenebrous Cult.

Hail the BRAVE NEW WEIRDo's!

Matt + Alex